Literacy and Numeracy Assessment Methods in The Early Years

Assessment is an integral part of all learning. Educators who are responsible for the facilitation of learning are also responsible for the valid assessment of this learning. Assessment is a tool that can be used to help children attain the goal of a curriculum/framework (Perry, 2000). The forms of assessment used and the ways in which they can be administered should reflect children’s abilities, meanwhile trying to develop them. According to Perry (2000), in the years prior to school, assessment is seen as a seamless part of learning, undertaken mainly informally through observation and conversation while the children undertake their normal, self-chosen task or activity.

Observing children in daily activities: http://www.learneverydayabout.com/assessment.cfm

Before any assessment task is given to a child or group of children, it is essential for the educator to be clear about the purpose, outcomes of interest, focus for interventions, validity of assessment data, progress, procedures, and value of the assessment, to provoke a successful outcome.  Perry (2000) suggests the educator think of a number of questions prior to beginning an assessment task:

1. Why are they assessing the numeracy and literacy knowledge or skills of their children
2. What knowledge or skills are they going to access
3. For whom are they assessing- i.e. children, state education authority, program developers, school, parents, etc.
4. How are they assessing the knowledge and skills
5. When will the assessment take place

Other assessment tools may be the use of work sheets which target specific learning areas. Wren and Watts (2002), have designed the Abecedarian Reading Assessment for educators to use to maximise their effectiveness by individualising their instruction to each student’s learning needs. The Abecedarian is divided into 6 major subtests in literacy/reading development. Most of these subtests are further broken into a variety of tasks. Research (Wren & Watts, 2002) has clearly shown the benefits of developing all of the knowledge domains tested by the Abecedarian early. The preponderance of research evidence suggests that children who have phoneme awareness by kindergarten are much more likely to be successful readers in third grade than children who lack phoneme awareness.

Using specific task to assess child's progress: http://www.childchart.com/news.html

The Abecedarian Reading Assessment document includes a series of tasks which can be marked off and assessed, with corresponding score sheets, covering the areas of letter knowledge, phonological awareness, phoneme awareness, alphabetic principle, vocabulary, and decoding. The document can be accessed and downloaded for free from: www.balancedreading.com  

References:

Perry, B. (2000). Early childhood numeracy. Canberra, ACT: Department of Education,

Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA) and Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers

(AAMT)

Wren, S., & Watts, J. (2002). The Abecedarian Reading Assessment. Retrieved from Abecedarian Reading Assessment http://www.balancedreading.com/assessment/abecedarian.pdf